But why is it there in the first place?
One of this month’s panelists for the Scarlet Quill Society talk (on SUNDAY, that’s coming RIGHT UP!) was hosting a discussion on social media this week about, well, unexamined tropes. Specifically, the talk turned to the “sorting hat” of HP fame, and about the trope, quiz, tendency, whatever you like to call it, that communities have of gleefully assigning Houses to their favorite celebrities, pets, etc. The thing that keeps coming up, see, is that one house. The green and silver one with the snake on the badge. If you’ve been alive and on the net in the past 20 years, you probably know someone who has said “Oh, I’m a _______!” to you. And, confession time, most of those quizzes? Assign that house to Yours Truly as well. Because they fail to ask the pertinent qualifier question for the house: do you believe in the value of racial purity above all else? Sure, you can say it’s about power and ambition, but to what end? The literal founder of the house said, in the really wretched poem about starting the wizarding school, that they only take purebloods because that’s what they believe in. That’s their ambition, and power is the means to achieve it. And in fact, the house founder literally left the school because it wasn’t racially pure. Remember that part? Sound familiar?
But rant aside, a lot of folks still defend the way those sorting quizzes are structured, because wouldn’t it be weird if there were four houses but nobody was ever sorted into one of them by the Buzzfeed Quiz Of The Week? It would! Once you’ve accepted that your wizarding school contains a house of Nazis, you have to furnish some Nazis to put in it. And if you’re not comfortable with that, you’d better start contorting yourself to find a way to explain that even though they’re literal Nazis they’re not really, because how could they be, because your friend just got sorted into there. And even in the stories told, nobody ever says “well what if we, I don’t know, didn’t have a house full of Nazis? What if we banned that like a bad frat?”
This is the problem with taking other people’s tropes – even time-honored ones like “let’s establish four virtues” – and plugging them into your world without taking them apart and examining them. If you don’t ask the right questions, you end up alienating your readers when they look at your story and are like “weird, why are half the people I’m supposed to like signed up for the wrong side of a racial war?“
So that’s what we’re doing again this month, although from a much different angle. We’re looking for tropes you didn’t examine because you don’t know they’re there, and teaching you how to spot them. Ready to play Trope Detectives with us? We’ll see you this Sunday!
~Rowan
This Week’s Writing Prompt is:
This week, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story, essay, or poem incorporating the following prompt:
Trope: Riding into the Sunset
We’re taking a cue from this year’s Scarlet Quill Society and getting some practice incorporating – or subverting – popular tropes. As long as we’re flipping the script, let’s flip ALL of them and start at the end of the story. See how close to the moment your hero Rides Into the Sunset you can start, and still get the whole story in. Or maybe it’s a slow burn, where we know the whole time that the hero won’t stay, but things keep happening? What’s your take? Play with the prompt, and when you’ve got your story down, come tell us about it! Share snippets of or links to your best story in Discord or on Facebook! Stuck? Check out last year’s — no, year before last! — series on responding to prompts!
Share your response in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord, by linking your blog post, Google Doc, or other file. Check out your fellow YeahWriters’ responses, and don’t forget to leave them some love in the comments!
Looking for our weekly grids? After nearly ten years, they’ve been retired. Read more about the latest changes to YeahWrite in the #500 Weekly Writing Challenge Kickoff Post.
The Schedule
We will release a new prompt on our blog every Friday at 12pm Eastern. Then it’s up to you! Write your response to the prompt on your own blog or website and share the link in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord. If you prefer to keep your work under wraps (and away from the eyes of potential publishers), you can still ask for beta readers in the Coffeehouse and share your work privately!
Every Monday, we’ll check in to see how you’re doing and what your writing goals are for the week.
Wednesdays are “Work-in-Progress Wednesdays.” Share a few sentences or even a paragraph or two in the Coffeehouse (no more than 250 words, please). Even if you’re not done writing, this could be the boost you need to stay motivated. Did you publish a book? Do you have a story in a magazine?
The First Friday of every month is for self-promotion, where you can share commercial links to your work for purchase. (You can always share the news that you’ve been accepted for publication, though!) And of course, the entire community is here 24-7 to share your victories and setbacks, challenges and accomplishments. So come on in, pull up a chair, and say hello. We’re all writers here.
Upcoming and Ongoing
Sign up for our email blast so you don’t miss out on any upcoming classes, workshops, or competitions.
Scarlet Quill Society (Free Workshop w/ Optional Paid Benefits)
Welcome to the secret back room where the Scarlet Quill Society meets. In this year-long workshop, we’ll be focusing on tropes! Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t avoid ’em. For the purpose of this year’s workshop, we’re defining a trope as a building block of storytelling. It’s a device or pattern of events that is used to solve plot or character problems or communicate meaning efficiently and effectively. Check out August’s post, in which we talk about the tropes you don’t know you’re adding to your stories, and how they affect your world and characters. Join us this Sunday at 2pm EDT for a chat with our panel of experts, or if you’re not a member or can’t afford the ticket this month, hop over to our YouTube channel later to check it out on a pay-what-you-can basis! If you have a good time, leave a tip and we’ll love you forever.
Scarlet Quill Society workshop posts are always free. In addition, we are offering a couple add-ons that we think you’ll find exciting and worth a few bucks a month: face-to-face (okay, virtual) monthly gatherings to delve into the topics and answer your questions, and an editorial backroom on Discord! And for a bonus, if you’re a paid SQS member and you can’t make it to a meeting, you can still send us questions beforehand and we’ll make sure to cover them.
Sign up for a membership today to join the Scarlet Quill Society and automatically receive the Zoom link and password for every meeting. One-off monthly meeting tickets can also be purchased on Kofi. At YeahWrite we believe information wants to be shared. If you can’t afford to join us for society meetings, we post the recording about a week later, and you’re welcome to leave the tip you can afford (even if that’s just a nice thank you comment). Check out our YouTube channel for more.
2023 Anthology? WATCH THIS SPACE!
At YeahWrite, like it says on the box, we believe that your words – and your voice – matter. That has always been the core of our mission: to help authors develop and share their individual voices, whether they write romance, fantasy, mysteries, literary fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything else. It’s all storytelling, and we want your stories to shine.
That’s why we’re excited to help them shine in print for the first time! Our 2023 anthology, opening soon for submissions, will include 20 flash stories (fiction and creative nonfiction) that have a clear authorial voice and an innovative structure: braided stories, epistolaries, stories told as logbooks or news articles – these are just examples of the sorts of stories we are excited to publish. Can’t figure out your genre? Not a problem, we’re not genre-limiting this one! So dig back into your archive for that special story to dust off and tune up, or get ready to put pen to paper for that new idea that will help you procrastinate on the other writing you should be doing.
Because we love our newsletter subscribers, we’ll give them an early heads up with all the submissions guidelines. We’ll also send you details on the Kickstarter we’re planning that should help make our anthology even better!
Super Challenge #28 (Fiction)
YeahWrite’s Super Challenge #28 (flash fiction) is officially over! Congratulations to our champion, MM Schreier, and to Alyssa Beatty and Jennifer Gunner for rounding out the top three! We cannot wait to showcase these three stories in our upcoming anthology ::flails::. But don’t worry, YeahWriters! If you didn’t make the top three in either of our 2023 Super Challenges, that doesn’t mean your chances are over to be published. We will be opening up for submissions! Stay tuned for more details (and be sure to sign up for our mailing list so you don’t miss out on any updates).
Spontaneous Writing Challenges
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
